Ezequiel Gamonal

EZEQUIEL GAMONAL, who has died aged 82, was a Peruvian prophet regarded by tens of thousands of followers as the Messiah.

A diminutive, rather bad-tempered figure who suffered from arthritis, Gamonal was worshipped by his sect, the Israelites of the New Universal Covenant. Its members were mainly Andean peasants who wore Old Testament costumes modelled on the Hollywood epics of Cecil B De Mille.

Gamonal, a former village shoemaker, taught that he had been chosen by God to inaugurate the new Israel, which had been transferred from the Middle East to Peru as a punishment for the original Israelites' loss of faith. The new kingdom would extend far into the Amazon, where it was believed the last Inca emperor had been sleeping since the Spanish invasion in the 16th century.

Belief in the sacredness of the jungle led the Israelites to found a number of "colonies" deep in the rainforest, where they sang psalms in wooden temples and farmed. However, Peru's media insisted that they were, in fact, a "diabolical cult" which murdered its own members. No evidence of this ever came to light, but unsubstantiated rumours continued to circulate of brethren killed because they had displeased the Messiah.

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In fact, most Israelite brothers and sisters seemed utterly devoted to their grumpy prophet. At his month-long birthday celebrations in 1999, 1,000 of the faithful crowded into the courtyard of his desert headquarters outside Lima and serenaded him for hours. The music swelled imposingly as an Indian dressed as Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor, handed over a golden sceptre to Gamonal, signifying that he was destined to bring the fabled empire back to life.

Throughout the festivities the old man watched impassively, chewing methodically on enormous pieces of pork, sitting on his throne, a reclining orthopaedic armchair. Although the Israelites observed most of the Levitical commandments faithfully, they were exempted from the ban on this meat, perhaps because the Messiah was so fond of it.

Ezequiel Ataucusi Gamonal was born in 1918 to a peasant family in southern Peru. It was while working as a shoemaker in the 1950s that he converted from Roman Catholicism to Seventh-day Adventism, though he was quickly expelled from the latter denomination after dressing as a Hebrew prophet and claiming to receive divine revelations.

Chief among these was a visit to what Gamonal called the "third heaven", in which he met the Father, Son and Holy Ghost and was ordered to copy the Ten Commandments on to a blackboard. From then on, observance of the Commandments became the first duty of the Israelites. In 1969, the new religion was recognised by the Peruvian state, and by the 1990s estimates of its strength ranged from 60,000 to 200,000.

Gamonal's cosmology was a complex and often confusing mixture of Seventh-day Adventism, Judaism and Inca legend. From the 1960s until his death, he taught that various apocalyptic disasters were about to befall the world, although on several occasions he was able to delay their arrival by petitioning God for more time. As a result, the deadline for the end of the world, originally scheduled for this year, was regularly pushed back.

It was beyond doubt, however, that Gamonal's followers, most of whom were peasants uprooted from their villages by the collapse of the rural economy in the 1970s, derived spiritual comfort from his teachings. For many, the Israelites' life of prayer offered a peaceful alternative to the Shining Path, the Maoist guerillas who terrorised Peru during the 1980s.

Gamonal was married several times but was renowned for his voracious sexual appetite. He nurtured political ambitions, twice running for President of Peru. He himself never wore the priestly robes of the Levites, explaining that he would only do so when it was time to announce the apocalypse. He died during the Israelites' Pentecost celebrations, and disappointed many of his followers by failing to fulfil his promise that he would rise again after three days.